The Abyss is an excellent movie which unfortunately came just a tad late for its time. Though the latest, it is perhaps the best of the recent onslaught of underwater horror/ action/adventure films including Leviathan and Deepstar Six. Though outwardly similar to the others, it actually has very different goals. The Abyss, Leviathan and Deepstar all deal with underwater miners, in the very near future, who come into contact with aliens deep under the ocean. But while Leviathan and Deepstar lean more towards Aliens than any other recent film, where the aliens in question are evil and destructive, The Abyss leans more towards E.T. in that the government and the environment are more at fault that the curious aliens. I found this particularly strange considering that The Abyss was advertised as being "from the makers of Aliens."

The plot of The Abyss revolves around the mysterious crash of a U.S. missile submarine. Fearing for the lives of any possible survivors, or the possibility of the Russians getting hold of the sub, they dispatch the nearest available underwater equipment, which turns out to belong to an underwater mining outfit. Along with a Navy SEAL team, they search for and find the crashed submarine.

They find no survivors, but as a top secret contingency plan, the SEALs take a nuclear warhead from the sub, to make sure the Russians never get their hands on it.

All the while a ferocious storm has been developing, and in the height of it, a gigantic ship-mounted crane breaks off of the surface control ship, severing the communication lines and smashing into the mining rig deep below. The momentum from the crane knocks them deeper down, into a huge underwater canyon which is the abyss. While the crew find more evidence pointing to intelligent life beneath the waves, in the form of several sightings of glowing creatures and a mysterious light, the SEAL team commande, goes insane. Let's just say that mad men and nuclear warheads don't mix well!

The suspense never stops in this movie, and the effects are spectacular. I never got over the feeling that the hero too much resembled Bruce Willis in Die Hard, or that the heroine resembled Sigourney Weaver. But the acting was decent, certainly good enough to support such an action packed script. Despite this, or the lateness of its arrival, this is definitely one of those movies you come away from thinking, "How long before it hits the video stores?"